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| Thursday, December 18, 2008 08:53 PM |
| (Last updated on Friday, December 19, 2008 08:16 AM) | | On the Viewer - Fringe (Episode 9, "The Dreamscape") |
 by Fëanor |
I went with a pseudo-liveblog style again for this post. These are just a bunch of thoughts I recorded as I was watching the episode, polished slightly after the fact.
This episode's horribly weird opening involves butterflies with knives for wings. Nice! But, there's no way a modern skyscraper would have windows on a floor that high up that you could break just by jumping at them. Still, great image, and I love the pan over to reveal the Massive Dynamic logo.
Poor Olivia; just about to go out and have a life, and then they drag her back in. No party for you!
She's seeing John again, too. That can't be good.
The vibrating pinned butterflies she sees in the dead guy's apartment were very creepy.
But the cuts on our jumper came from the inside. So the butterflies weren't real. Crazy.
Coffee yogurt? That Walter!
Hmmm. Peter has a mystery girl...
Olivia goes to a weird old basement full of boxes, which she was directed to by an email from her dead lover, and when she finds that one of the boxes is mysteriously thumping and moving... she opens it?! She's crazy.
So does she feel better or worse that the email from the dead guy gave her a great lead on the case?
Ah, Peter's mystery girl (whose name is Tessa) is part of Peter's mystery past with the mystery people who want to hurt him. Interesting. And she has an abusive boyfriend named Michael, who may be one of the mystery people who want to hurt Peter.
I like the weird science we're talking about this episode: believing something so hard your body makes it real. That's cool stuff.
Walter makes a lot of references to all the drugs he's taken in this episode. Maybe if he'd laid off them a bit he could have stayed out of the insane asylum. Just a thought!
Okay, I could have done without the part where Walter got an erection.
The Bible is for praying you don't die. That's reassuring!
Ah, now Olivia's in that dreamscape they mentioned in the title. Cool.
Are they deliberately paralleling John's lying relationship with Olivia with Peter's lying relationship with Tessa, or is that a connection I just made up?
Exciting end to Olivia's trip through the dreamscape. That moment where John seemed to see her was cool and creepy.
(As an aside, the accompanying ads for "Lie to Me," an upcoming show starring Tim Roth as an expert on lying who solves crimes, are pretty interesting. I'd be curious to see the show.)
Oh, Peter. Revealing your presence in Boston to your enemy, beating the guy up, and throwing the cliched "don't touch my woman" threat at him? Not a good move.
I love how Olivia found the phone number, realized it was the suspect from the dreamscape, but then didn't panic, and instead came up with a convincing cover to give him on the spot. But it is a little ridiculous that they'd be able to pinpoint the guy's exact location from a land line that redirected to his cell. Is everybody's cell phone a tracking device now?
Olivia's dreamscape suspect introduces an interesting new idea: that the Pattern and all this crazy crap that's been happening could just be a smokescreen so Massive Dynamic can do whatever it wants to whoever it wants. In other words, Massive Dynamic and William Bell are behind everything. Dude, they need to put this guy in a big metal room in a giant bunker underground, guarded by an army. But who am I kidding? There's no way they can protect him. He'll be dead in five minutes.
Yep, I was right. It pisses me off that Olivia just left her incredibly important witness in the hospital, apparently guarded by a couple of guys we never see, and then wandered off to Massive Dynamic to threaten Nina with what the witness could say. That's a dumb move. Why let them know you even have a witness yet? And why assume two guards can protect him when he's just lying in a bed in a public hospital? Olivia knows better than anyone what these people are capable of. That sequence just doesn't make any sense.
Woah. Creepy ending. That's the most disturbing email she's gotten from the dead guy yet!
This episode was disappointing, because it has so many cool ideas and so many cool sequences, and yet it also features one or two essential plot and character flaws. Ah, well. That's Fringe for you. |
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